Pascal is Nvidia’s next generation architecture and it is coming after Maxwell of course. The company says it will launch next year, but details are still sketchy.

According Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang, it is coming with Mixed Precision and this is the new architecture that will succeed Maxwell. Nvidia claims that the new GPU core has its own architectural benefits.

3D memory or High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), is a big thing and Jen Hsun Huang claims 32GB is possible with the new architecture, compared to 12GB on the new Maxwell-based Titan X. This is a staggering increase from the current standard of 4GB per card, to 12GB with Titan, and probably up to 32GB with Pascal. NV Link should enable a very fast interconnect that has 5 times the performance of PCI Express, which we all use right now. More memory and more bandwidth are obviously needed for 4K/UHD gaming.

Huang also shared some very rough estimates, including Convolution Compute performance, will be four times faster with FP16 precision in mixed precision mode. The 3D memory offers a six-fold increase in GPU to memory bandwidth.

Convolution and bandwidth at the front, and bandwidth to convolution at the back of the GPU, should get be five times faster than on Maxwell cards. It is complex fuzzy logic that is hard to explain with so few details shared by Nvidia about the Pascal architecture.

The width update interconnect with NV Link should get you a twofold performance increase and when you when you multiply these two numbers, Nvidia ends up with a comes to 10x compute performance increase compared to Maxwell, at least in what Nvidia CEO calls the “CEO bench”.

He warned the audience that this is a very rough estimate. This 10X number mainly targets deep learning, as it will be able to teach the deep learning network ten times faster. This doesn’t meant that the GPU offers 10 times the GPU performance for gaming compared to Maxwell, not even close, we predict.

Volta made it back to the roadmap and currently it looks like the new architecture will be introduced around 2018, or about three years from now.

Volta was previously supposed to follow in the footsteps of Maxwell, which is rolling out this year, at least this was the case last time we saw Nvidia's roadmap.

Things changed today at the Nvidia's GPU technology conference, Jen Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia just showed an updated roadmap with Pascal replacing the Maxwell architecture at some point in 2016.

Volta is currently scheduled to come after Pascal, so definitely from late 2016 onwards. Nvidia told us that the Pascal got pulled in and the module that was shown at the keynote is meant for the increasingly popular HTPC form factor.

To clear any possible confusion, Pascal will make it to mobile, desktop, graphics card factors, so there is nothing to worry about. Just like Maxwell it will show up in all segments where Nvidia needs an up to date GPU.

Volta is now coming after Maxwell, that is the official line. Pascal comes in a unique form factor that opens up a lot of opportunities, but again this very unique chip with stacked memory and NVlink communication is happening in late 2016, quite some time from now.

Nvidia has officially and publicly updated its GPU roadmap to show what to expect after we are done with the Maxwell GPU family, the Volta GPU family. Named after one of the great Italian physicists, Alessandro Volta, known among other things for the invention of the battery, the Volta GPU family will bring an impressive new feature - stacked DRAM.

Since we are still far away from the launch of Volta GPU family Nvidia did not reveal that many details but it has detailed one of the key features of the Volta GPU family, the stacked DRAM concep. The reason, or simply put the advantage behind stacked DRAM is to place the DRAM close (on the same package) to the GPU and connect it, according to Nvidia, by cutting a hole through the silicon layer placed between the GPU and stacked DRAM. By doing this, Nvidia should be able to improve both bandwidth and latency by getting rid of the standard/external memory bus.

According to what Jen-Hsun Huang revealed at GTC 2013, Nvidia aims to achieve a 1TB/sec of bandwidth on Volta which ends up around three times what we are now seeing on the GTX Titan. Jen-Hsun Huang noted that with this kind of bandwidth it is possible to move the equivalent of a full Blu-Ray disc worth of data in just 1/50th of a second.

It all sounds quite impressive but since Maxwell is expected in 2014, we will not see the Volta GPU family before the 2016, at least if all goes well and Nvidia follows its standard two year GPU schedule. Bear in mind that Nvidia did want Kepler to be the 2011 rather than the 2012 product and Maxwell slipped from 2013 to 2014, so we certainly hope that Volta will not share the same fate.